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Complex GUI Architecture Discussion?

Posted by Cliff on from the nuts-and-bolts-behind-the-desktop dept.

XNuke asks: "I have been searching for intelligent discussion (on dead trees or otherwise) of the issues involved in designing very complex GUIs. Things on the level of TecPlot, AutoCad, 3DS, etc, where there may be very many different views of the same data and there are many degrees of freedom for the user. I am not interested in 'where to put the buttons', but rather the nuts and bolts of making the 'Well Designed UI' work. I guess I am looking for a sort of 'Design Patterns applied to a big deskptop application' sort of discussion. It is no problem to find discussions of Model-View-Controller concepts at the component level, but at the application level there seems to be nothing. Too often the architectural level discussions encompass non-interactive, server side design issues and not the extremely chaotic problems a client side application with many degrees of freedom has. Short of wading through megabytes of source code for KWord et. al., does anyone know of any digested information? There is obviously no 'One Solution' to this, but there must be something out there."

5 of 361 comments (clear)

  1. Human Factors by denubis · · Score: 2, Offtopic

    I'd recommend starting with Norman's The design of every day things. Then, if you're still interested, look over human factors resources. There are very large books that have been written on this question.

    1. Re:Human Factors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Offtopic

      Ive found Edward Tuftes books to provide a good basis for this kind of development. His focus medium is print (mostly) but I think the message is applicable to computer display as well. All Implimentation details considered, your biggest problem is the meaningful display of multivariate data.

      http://www.edwardtufte.com/290901521/tufte/books _v dqi

    2. Re:Human Factors by CaptDeuce · · Score: 2, Offtopic

      These are the same people who think having one common title bar that is shared by all people is a good thing ...

      Sorry, but your statement makes no sense. Are you speaking about the use of one menu bar shared by all windows of an application?

      If yes, there are two major advantages to this design: menus are always in the same place, and one menu bar takes up less screen space than multiple menu bars.

      ... and still refused to admit they were stupid to choose cooperative multitasking instead of premptive multitasking.

      Whoa. They didn't choose; the situation was dicatated by the fact the until System 6 there was NO multitasking! Cooperative multitasking was the quickest way to implement multitasking without breaking existing applications. Apple stated very early on that they would eventually implement preemptive multitasking but, alas, it never came to pass. The endeavor died with the failure of Copeland. Then Apple bought NeXT.

      And lets not forget the whole mhz myth marketing scheme. I think you should take anything Apple tells you with a block of salt.

      Don't you mean the Intel Mhz myth? Where a higher clock speed CPU is automatically faster than a lower clock speed CPU just because one number is bigger than the other?

      --
      "Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
  2. Mac gets it right. by Faggot · · Score: 2, Offtopic

    Macintosh gets UI design right with Interface Builder (which came from NeXTSTEP). I cannot recommend it enough.

    --

    But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.

  3. Anything by Alan Cooper by Krelnik · · Score: 4, Offtopic
    Check out anything by Alan Cooper. His "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" is more of a rant than a guidebook, but still excellent reading. "About Face" is probably more of what you want.

    He would call what you are talking about "interaction design" not "interface design". The Inmates book makes a good case for how the two are different and why interaction design is a better approach.